In August of 1908, mobs of white people attempted to drive the African American citizens of Springfield, Illinois, from that city during two days of murder, arson, and beatings. Outraged that such assaults should take place in the hometown of the Great Emancipator, reformer Oswald Garrison Villard urged like-minded people to find ways to change what historian Roberta Senechal calls in a new book “America’s dismal racial status quo.” The eventual result of that plea was the founding in 1910 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which offered a program of organized dissent to the discrimination and violence aimed at African Americans.
Another of the people intrigued by the stories was Cullom Davis, a history professor at Springfield’s just-opened Sangamon State University. Most historians immediately succumb to the Lincoln virus upon their arrival in Springfield–even Davis today heads a project researching Lincoln’s legal career–but 20 years ago Davis recognized that the riots revealed much more about Springfield than Lincoln did.
The news that came out of Springfield that August would have inspired any bigot. On a Friday in mid-month, an African American laborer named George Richardson was arrested and charged with having assaulted the wife of a streetcar driver on the previous night in her home in Springfield’s working-class North End. As that Friday went on, a crowd of hostile whites gathered at the local sheriff’s office demanding action. It grew so quickly in size and menace that the nervous sheriff mounted a guard of armed deputies around the jail that held the prisoner.
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Damage to the city treasury was substantial, as was the cost to the city’s reputation. “Not since New York’s [military] draft riot of 1863 had the white public been so forcibly reminded of the vehemence of anti-black hostility in the North,” writes Senechal. “For weeks . . . Springfield [was] a byword for intolerance, corruption, and disorder.”
It was in Sangamon County, of course, that white authorities did not even bother to record the names of blacks injured by rioters. In Sangamon County, black customers were refused service in white stores or overcharged, and blacks were barred from the list of invitees to the banquet in February 1909 celebrating the centenary of Lincoln’s birth. When a touring theatrical company brought Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman to town–the work that inspired D.W. Griffith’s famous film celebrating the Klan, The Birth of a Nation–a committee of black Springfieldians warned the mayor that public performance might excite violence; the mayor’s response was to order that only whites be allowed into the theater.
Back in 1908 the Springfield press offered its own version of the social-strain theory. The arrival of black families into previously white residential enclaves was “tormenting” to respectable whites, one paper explained. But Senechal found that no black family established in an otherwise all-white block was attacked. Indeed, many rioters who traveled across town to join the attack on the Black Belt passed up isolated, vulnerable black families in neighborhoods on the way.
